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    Atlanta's Druid Hills: A Brief History
    Atlanta's Druid Hills: A Brief History
    Atlanta's Druid Hills: A Brief History
    Ebook163 pages2 hours

    Atlanta's Druid Hills: A Brief History

    By Robert Hartle Jr.

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    The Druid Hills neighborhood is characterized by rolling hills, magnificent trees and shrubs and gorgeous, expansive houses. Its Ponce de Leon corridor bears the imprint of the founder of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. The brainchild of Joel Hurt, the neighborhood was brought to fruition by some of Atlanta's most prominent businessmen, including Asa Candler, founder of Coca-Cola. It was these movers and shakers of the city who lived in the neighborhood during the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1914, Druid Hills was permanently altered with the announcement that it would be the site of Emory University's new main campus. Now the residents coexist with what has become an international university community. Historian Robert Hartle Jr. has written an honest, impeccably researched tribute to Druid Hills, truly one of the jewels in Atlanta's crown.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateJun 27, 2008
    ISBN9781625844699
    Atlanta's Druid Hills: A Brief History
    Author

    Robert Hartle Jr.

    Robert Hartle Jr. has lived in Atlanta, Georgia, since 1984. He studied history at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas, before moving back to Atlanta. After discovering his love for history and writing in college, Hartle worked as a research assistant on Emory University professor of law Polly Price's book, Judge Richard S. Arnold: A Legacy of Justice on the Federal Bench, before writing his first book, Atlanta's Druid Hills: A Brief History. This is Hartle's second book with The History Press.

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      Book preview

      Atlanta's Druid Hills - Robert Hartle Jr.

      Four.

      Introduction

      Olmsted’s masterpiece, to my mind, is the little known but exquisite estate of trees, lakes, lawns and rolling hills, encompassing Emory University bang in the middle of Atlanta, Ga.

      —Alistair Cooke, The Americans

      Cooke’s storied writing and broadcasting career included a period as host of Omnibus, CBS’s first series, beginning in 1952, to be devoted to the arts. It was here that Jessica Tandy revived her original Broadway performance as the character Blanche DuBois. However, not until some thirty-five years later would she find her greatest critical acclaim in Driving Miss Daisy, set and filmed in the neighborhood Cooke called Olmsted’s Masterpiece.

      Even a New York Times reporter took notice while scouting the city before the 1996 Olympics. Comparing Druid Hills with the fashionable Buckhead neighborhood, he wrote:

      Just as lovely on the east side of town near Emory University is the Druid Hills area, where the film Driving Miss Daisy was shot and the real Miss Daisy lived. Frederick Law Olmsted designed some of the small parks in the area, with their rolling hills and manicured greenery. Druid Hills meanders off Ponce de Leon Avenue and is best exemplified by its grand, rambling houses built near the beginning of the century on shady streets such as Lullwater, Oakdale and Springdale Roads.¹

      Long before it was placed on the National Register of Historic places in 1979, Druid Hills was home to settlers who had moved from the Carolinas—such as Naman Hardman, who built the Hardman Cemetery in 1825. The cemetery, though not the Baptist church that once stood beside it, still exists on land belonging to Emory University’s Clairmont Campus. The church, along with much of Atlanta, was burned by Sherman in 1864 after he had used it as a field hospital following the battle for Decatur.²

      While preservation efforts for the cemetery succeeded, other pre–Druid Hills landmarks are long gone. One of these was a medicine house, owned and operated by Dr. Chapmon Powell, located at the intersection of North Decatur and Clairmont Roads. Once upon a time, both whites and Native Americans were given medical treatment in an area now occupied by strip malls.³

      Powell’s log cabin practice was moved here after his son-in-law W.J. Houston purchased about five hundred acres of his land. Hahn Woods lies off Houston Mill Road at the spot where Houston transformed his plantation’s mill into the area’s first electric-powered generation plant. This occurred in 1905, more than forty years after Federal Fourth Corps troops crossed the south fork of Peachtree Creek at Durand Mill on July 20, 1864, en route through the city to the sea. Two days prior, skirmishing had gone on at Clairmont and North Decatur, near the Powell House, which served as Sherman’s headquarters on July 19.⁴

      In 1821, Native Americans surrendered the land now known as Druid Hills to the Georgia government, which surveyed it into plots of 202.5 acres. Drawings for the land were then held for Georgia residents. Over time, John Gerdine Johnson accumulated most of the land surrounding what are now Ponce de Leon Avenue and Briarcliff, North Decatur and Lullwater Roads. By the time Joel Hurt purchased all but ten acres from Johnson’s surviving family in 1890, Atlanta was in its rebuilding period. What Hurt was able to recognize, before most others, was that Atlanta would rebuild at a staggering rate, and the need for residential neighborhoods near the city would soon be in vogue and very much in demand.

      Chapter 1

      Designing According to Nature

      Joel Hurt and Frederick Law Olmsted

      In an Atlanta Constitution article dated June 3, 1905, the author—although he does not specifically refer to it—describes the eighteenth-century European debate between the carefully structured, geometrical French landscape ideal, and the free-flowing, let man build around nature while taking as few liberties as possible British landscape ideal, which was the current trend in America.

      [In the courtly French gardens] there were flower beds bordered with designs in dwarf box, upon which the aspiring youth might demonstrate a theorem in geometry or perhaps cross the pons asinorum. But the modern school of art has changed all this, and architecture out of doors no more follows the conventional lines of Euclid, nor are the flowers expected to bloom into theorems. In the best of architecture, otherwise known as landscape gardening, nature has her own sweet will…Now the house nestles in the landscape as naturally as if it had grown there and no barbarism of a geometrical flower bed or conical hedge is allowed to startle the eye with the painful suggestion of engineering diagrams, where the repose of nature invited you to leave off toil and enter into rest.⁵

      The article from which the above extract was taken was written before Druid Hills had even been developed, yet its author is convinced that the only place comparable to it in terms of beauty and diversity of plant life is the Vanderbilt arboretum at Biltmore. That is probably the highest compliment one could pay, coming from the modern school of thought, since the Vanderbilt arboretum at Biltmore was one of the few places in the South designed by the father of landscape architecture Frederick Law Olmsted. Obviously the author picked up on these similarities, since the Olmsted brothers—Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (Olmsted’s son) and John Charles Olmsted (Olmsted’s stepson)—designed the original plan. At the time, Renaissance Man Joel Hurt was Atlanta’s most progressive developer, intent on uniting the arts with business and owning a keen eye for predicting future trends. In 1890, Hurt began a courtship of Olmsted that would indelibly link him to the founding of Druid Hills.

      Joel Hurt was born on July 31, 1850, in Hurtsboro, Alabama. Hurt was not wealthy, but he was able to matriculate at Auburn University for one year before finishing his education at Franklin College (now the University of Georgia) in Athens, Georgia. He graduated in 1871 with a civil engineering degree. From there, Hurt spent the next four years working as a railroad surveyor in different parts of the country before relocating to Atlanta in 1875. A jack-of-all-trades if ever there was one, Hurt would spend the next fifty years involved in everything from insurance to streetcars, to botany and horticulture.

      Hurt’s first undertaking was alongside his brother in E.F. (Elisha Fletcher) and Joel Hurt, an insurance and real estate firm. The name would soon change to Hurt and Low when Elisha left the rebuilding city of Atlanta for New York and was replaced by James Low. Soon after, Hurt sold the company and formed the Atlanta Home Insurance Company.

      Hurt was also a major promoter of the electric streetcar. In 1891, he consolidated six different electric streetcar lines, creating the Atlanta Consolidated Street Railway Company. Just two years earlier, Hurt had financed Atlanta’s first streetcar line, which ran along Edgewood Avenue with one end stopping downtown and the other stopping at Inman Park, Atlanta’s first residential suburb.

      In 1886, Hurt founded the East Atlanta Land Company, through which he surveyed and developed Edgewood Avenue and Inman Park. One criticism of Hurt throughout his career was that he would, often without proper funding, dive headfirst into a project only to abandon it shortly thereafter.⁶ Judging by the massive number of projects he undertook, and their magnitude, it is no surprise that Hurt was forced to abandon some and therefore could come across like a child who begs and begs for a new toy and then grows tired of it after a few hours. However, while he may have been prone to jumping the gun on business endeavors, it would be hard to overstate his influence on post–Civil War Atlanta.

      As one admirer believes:

      Joel Hurt was so far ahead of the times and the section of the country in which he lived, that the progress he made more often than not had to be accomplished single handed…It was because of the energy and progressiveness of such men as Joel Hurt…that the south recovered as rapidly as it did.⁷

      Atlanta was certainly recovering remarkably fast. In 1870, the post–Civil War depredation to Atlanta was clear as its population stood just under twenty-two thousand people. Just twenty years later, the population had tripled to approximately sixty-six thousand.⁸ Hurt’s awareness of the continued population growth, combined with the success of Atlanta’s first residential suburb, Inman Park, and his increasing interest in botany, impelled Hurt to organize the Kirkwood Land Company with plans to construct a new residential neighborhood northeast of the city.

      At the time, landscapes were moving away from restrictive geometrical confines intent on shaping the environment and toward a free-flowing adherence to the land’s natural layout. The man most closely associated with this movement—whose work Hurt was very familiar with—was Brookline, Massachusetts–based landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

      Several factors contributed to the partnership formed between Hurt and Olmsted. First, Olmsted had a great interest in the South, having made many visits to different states and recording his observations in numerous volumes of journals. At the time he became associated with Hurt, Olmsted was nearing the end of his professional life and had a sincere interest in seeing a reunified United States. Olmsted’s intentions are made clear in an 1894 letter to his stepson John C. Olmsted:

      I want the firm to have an established good will in the South. Then, as we would all be called abolitionists in the South, I think a demonstration that the time has passed in which hatred of abolitionists is an element of consequence in matters of professional business is of some value. ⁹

      Secondly, Olmsted had recently designed the grounds for George Washington Vanderbilt II’s Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and was interested in pursuing additional projects in the South. Furthermore, his help had been solicited in the planning of the Cotton States and International Exposition, which took place in 1895 in what is now Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. (The event was a showcase of sorts for Southeastern businesses and technologies. Almost 800,000 people attended, and the event drew national attention after Booker T. Washington gave his legendary Atlanta Compromise speech.)

      Though Olmsted and Hurt could not have been raised in more different environments—Hurt grew up in rural Alabama and was still a boy at the start of the Civil War, while Olmsted was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a grown man and ardent abolitionist by that time—Elizabeth A. Lyon notes similarities between the two: "Both men were civil engineers who developed an

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